Clashes between Egyptian riot police and rock-hurling protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square continue on Sunday, with violence spilling over to other cities. Riot police are said to have gone out in force, using clouds of tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Two people are believed to have been killed and over 670 injured as clashes continue into the third day.

Police were said to be firing rubber bullets and tear gas, and beating protesters with batons in an attempt to clear Tahrir Square overnight, dismantling a tent camp set up to commemorate protesters killed in the February uprising.

According to reports, most of Tahrir Square was covered with debris and shattered glass on Sunday following what is reported to be the worst standoff between police and protesters in months. Source

Reminder: The first revolution 'the fearless Asmaa Mahfouz'

IN SYRIA:

The headquarters of the Syrian ruling party in Damascus has been shelled with propelled grenades on Sunday. The new violence erupted just hours after the Arab League ultimatum for the Syrian leadership to stop the crackdown on protesters expired.

At least two rocket propelled grenades were fired at the Baath Party headquarters in Damascus early on Sunday. There have been no reports of deaths or injuries, however. According to local media the building was mostly empty at the time of the attack.

“The attack was just before dawn and the building was mostly empty. It seems to have been intended as a message to the regime,” confirmed 'a witness', as cited by Reuters. Source

Submitted by Tyler Durden: While everyone's attention was focused intently on peripheral European bond spreads last week and the incessant call for ECB intervention, a dramatic (and contagiously panic-worthy) move occurred in the European Investment Bank (EIB) bonds.

For those unfamiliar, the EIB is the EU's IMF-equivalent and is the largest international non-sovereign lender and borrower. Technically, it is defined as "the European Union's long-term lending institution established in 1958 under the Treaty of Rome. It supports the EU’s priority objectives, especially European integration and the development of economically weak regions." Source charts etc.

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States. Source

Update: The neighbourhood "technocrat" with the pepper spray is

Lt. John Pike of University of California Police. So to our words for the day... Can you say "scum-bucket"? Another who was clearly brought up to follow the gospel according to St. Bastard!

Rap star Immortal Technique says the whole anti-Wall Street movement is rooted in a slow erosion of civil liberties, in which a violation of basic rights sparked the nationwide wave of protest.

“More and more people are realizing just how disenfranchised they are. They are realizing just how little control they have over their own democracy,” he told RT.

The rapper believes that what is happening now in the United States is mirrored in other parts of the world, where people are opposed to the use of centralized power and yet want the system to be more efficient.

“They would almost surrender their freedom to more efficient government – similar to what Russia will have to deal with when they decide whether Putin is going to come back into power,” he said. “There are a lot of people who will think: ‘Oh, functionality over the visage of democracy’ that exists there. So I think the entire world is really dealing with that now: will it be oligarchy, autocratic regime that’s more functional because it’s backed by corporations, or more of a democratic regime that could be hit-and-miss on certain things, may take a hit on jobs.”

Immortal Technique pointed out that people in his country have been forced to face the same kind choice dilemma because the entire idea of what the United States of America is has been perverted.

“The idea of America is to give democracy and freedom to people, but I think that now, more than ever, it’s become about placating people and about pacifying them, so they don’t ask for the amount of freedom that they are guaranteed, almost like when police stop you and then they get offended that you seem to know your rights,” he explained.

“My answer to that has always been: listen, if we were 20,000 deep right then and there, we could have torn downtown to pieces. We didn’t. When you were macing women in the street, we could have ripped the village limb from limb, but we didn’t, because we don’t hate America. We love America and we want it become a better place,” he continued.

Speaking of apparent triggers of the OWS movement and US President Barack Obama’s role in the crisis, the rapper says that so far, Obama has been getting away with many things, because “he is 10 times the campaigner than he is a president.” Now, when his ability to fulfill his own promises has been questioned, the overall discontent of ordinary Americans has increased.

“When [Obama] came in, he came in with the idea that he was going to reform things. And when that was not met, when the criteria that he set up himself for what the reform would entail was not completed – I don’t think that created the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it definitely added fuel to the fire,” Immortal Technique concluded. Source

The Complete And Annotated Guide To The European Bank Run (Or The Final Phase Of Goldman's World Domination Plan)

"Nervous investors around the globe are accelerating their exit from the debt of European governments and banks, increasing the risk of a credit squeeze that could set off a downward spiral. Financial institutions are dumping their vast holdings of European government debt and spurning new bond issues by countries like Spain and Italy... Click here full story ZeroHedgeTo summarize: everyone is dumping European paper, except for the ECB and Italian banks, which have no choice and instead have to double down and buy more. In the meantime, the market is going increasingly bidless as liquidity evaporates, confidence has disappeared and virtually everyone now expects a repeat of Lehman brothers. Of course, this means that when the bottom is finally out from the market, the implosion of the Italian banking system, and thus economy, will be instantaneous. And when Italy goes, so goes its $2 trillion+ in sovereign debt, and at that point we will see just how effectively hedged and offloaded the rest of the world is, as contagion shifts from Italy and slowly but surely engulfs the entire world.

Incidentally, is it really that surprising that Goldman is now doing its best to precipitate a bank run of Europe's major financial institutions by "suddenly" exposing the truth that was there all along?During the great financial crisis of 2008, the one biggest winner from the collapse of Bear and Lehman was none other than the squid. This time around, Goldman has set its sights on Europe and has already made sure that its tentacles will be in firmly in control at all the right places when the collapse comes, as the Independent shows.

And when banks are falling over like houses of cards in the middle of a tornado cluster, and the financial power vacuum is in desperate need to be filled, who will step in once again but... Goldman Sachs.

WASHINGTON — They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it. Source

An interesting and succinct compare-and-contrast (by MEP Daniel Hannan) of the U.S. Constitution and its European equivalent (Lisbon Treaty) presented with little comment except to note in the last week we have discussed how the Irish view their German masters, how the French/Italians/Spanish will do pretty much anything in order that the Bundesbank will enable ECB monetization, and perhaps more critically the exodus of capital not merely from peripheral European debt markets but from the core also. We suspect the status quo cannot exist much longer (Keynesian Endgame?) and regimes (fiscal/monetary/political) will change as tail risk becomes the only risk.

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Are YOU Involved or Institutionalized? Our belief that the global economic crisis would persist and deepen is being vindicated and current events are now as clear as ever on the matter. Time for all of us to wake up, stand up and be counted or continue to lose all our liberties. Protect your homes and families. The sun will still rise but financial chaos and suffering due to the global fascist banksters' greed and corruption, slaughter due to the MIC's directed world wars in our name etc. is not pretty. We are feeling the effect on our society the size and like of which we have never known.

We are way past being surprised at the blanket suppression of this information by the BBC and main stream media propaganda machines. Information is clearly available elsewhere and unchallenged, accounts for a far more realistic rendition of what we have actually seen and what we continue to see develop, whilst the main stream news put out leaves many confused and bewildered, 99.9% of us wrong footed and the awakened indignant. As we can now see, the apparently 'soft fascist' powers that be aim to block these alternative avenues of information. Book up, "Long Live the Evolution."Feel free to copyme. Angelo Agathangelou.

P.S. The MHRM, are calling out the constant misinformation disseminated by and maintain our open challenge especially to western radical feminists, to point out just one area where government in the UK, Europe or anywhere else in the English speaking world disadvantages women and girls when compared with men and boys, ...the wage disparity myth having long been debunked by serious academics and statisticians. So far this challenge has remained unanswered. Western feminism is obsolete.

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N.B.

These pages exist because we believe information from all perspectives should be aired, they do not necessarily reflect our views unless explicitly stated. We do not intend to cause offense, but we feel there is a need for such a shift in our society that to call it change rather than evolution would be an understatement. A velvet revolution towards living with reality for the individual, the family and society. A revolution towards living within our means and taking responsibility for ourselves, instead of mortgaging the future of our children to bloated leech faux democracy for the benefit of Ponzi 'banksters' and The Military Industrial Complex.